The game outside the game. The Metagame, a concept that exists for all competitive games, can't be easily defined in one sentence. Put simply, the Metagame is the question of how everyone else is playing. If you know the answer, you can then tailor your own play to take advantage of their weakpoints.

For example, you've been watching your buddy play Street Fighter II in the arcade. You notice he uses the same moves and Combos over and over. Therefore, when you later decide to play against him yourself, you use a character and moves that you know can beat him. Instead of going in blind, your foreknowledge of his favorite strategies gives you an advantage.

Knowing the metagame is vital for gamers who are much into Tournament Play. Many a tournament has been won by a player who cannily predicted which way the pendulum would swing, and many, many players have scrubbed out as a result of a miscalculation of the Metagame.

A common Metagame term is the Mirror Match, where you play against someone using the same thing as you are; the same video game character, or card deck, or whatever. A Mirror Match often requires special strategies, metagaming the metagame.

The metagame usually evolves in this manner:

Phase 1: Where the players will test out the game, mostly using the game's genre's basic conventions and methods from other similar games (including previous games in the series).

Phase 2: Where the game's obvious resources and strategies are well known and the players will start to get creative, usually leading to something that was not intended by the developers, including bugs (both good and bad).

Phase 3: Where the metagame evolved so much that the Tournament level playing of the game is more or less completely different from what the developers had in mind. After this the metagame evolves through the patches, expansions or the lucky discovery of some unusual application of the existing tools or bugs, after which the cycle starts anew.

It should probably be noted that the term "metagame" is also used pejoratively when it comes to Tabletop Games and other roleplaying games that expect players not to jump In and Out of Character. Here, using The Metagame is often considered somewhat akin to cheating, since it's information that the player's character couldn't possibly know (since the character doesn't know he's in a game), and shouldn't be making use of.

Naturally, this can cause problems for new players, even going so far as to become a Guide Dang It. In some cases the Metagame can further confuse new players, particularly for adaptations: what should be good, based on the source material, isn't in the game itself. (We have a trope for this, CCG Importance Dissonance, but it doesn't just happen in card games.)

Examples:

Board Games

Chess has a metagame, evolved over eons of play. One might say that the metagame is the game.

If you have ever played in any organizationally-sanctioned tournament, held anywhere at all, at some point in your life, it is guaranteed that every move you made was dutifully logged via algebraic notation, and then almost certainly dissected down to numbingly exhaustive detail, so as to understand every available nuance of both how you played then, and potentially will now.

Gary Kasparovs' famous rematch versus Deep Blue in 1997 involved a curious metagame factor. In the first game, Deep Blue made a puzzling play that was really just a hole in its heuristics - it is only as good as its program. This threw Kasparov for a loop. In the second game, Deep Blue made a second error, which Kasparov did not see and cost him the game. Some of the reports basically amounted to Gary being unable to believe the machine could screw up so badly. He attributed the moves to deep insight and thought himself out of a draw, turning it to a loss.

Go, having existed for thousands of years with one of the simplest rulesets in the board-game world, is even more purely metagame. The rules of Go can be described in full in a few sentences: one player places black stones and one player places white stones on a board. When a group of stones is surrounded, it disappears. The player who surrounds the largest amount of board area at the end wins. Naively, one might assume that Go play consists of mostly of surrounding stones, but in fact this almost never happens. Because it is possible to arrange stones in a "living" shape, one that cannot be captured, advanced players tend not to waste their time actually surrounding each other's shapes. So do Go players spend the game trying to build living shapes? Not exactly. Because both players know how to build living shapes, advanced players don't waste precious time expanding shapes that they know are potentially alive... Go strategy becomes so complex and high-level that the basic mechanics of the game are unrecognizable. Professional games without time-limits are known to go on for months (playing about 6 hours a day, once per week) before their completion.

Professional RPS actually moves out of the Metagame realm and into the pure skill of trying to remain random (which is hard for humans to do). The first player to suffer a psychological breakdown after hours of RPS play and become predictable loses.

There have been rumors of discovery of a board game with simple rules under the countless metagame layers of Diplomacy, but it might just be the Russians trying to double-cross us again.

Diplomacy has a biannual zine. which discusses the new strategies and ideas, amazingly still developing after 56 years. As often as not, an article or two in each issue is about ways to counter a strategy described in the previous issue.

The metagame of tic-tac-toe means that it is virtually unplayable for any two people with even casual experience of it (or, to put it another way, the only winning move is not to play).

In an example of meta-metagaming, Tic-tac-toe is a perfect example of a Solved Game because the entire game can be understood by a reasonably intelligent adult and the absolute best strategy discovered. Any game with zero random element and a finite set of moves could be solved, though we humans are unlikely to be able to get it and it would be up to a computer to run the strategy. Connect 4 and Checkers have been solved; Go and Chess are far too complex for 2015 technology. More can be found at the Game Breaker page.

Anyone who's played Ticket To Ride knows how important the little two-train and three-train routes into Las Vegas can become, and experienced players will often fight over who nabs those routes on turns two and three.

Kingsburg, being a game about building up a small village using different tiered tech trees, has spawned a number of favoured meta-strategies. A favourite is ignoring military gains in favour of economy, then purchasing high point value religious and cultural holdings in the end game knowing that the highest-tiered one will inevitably be destroyed.

Clue / Cluedo is unlikely to be won by a player making guesses at random as the basic rules might suggest. The trick is to try to force the other players to show you the information you want whilst otherwise impeding their own progress. This often involves making guesses that should be illogical, for example suggesting rooms and murder weapons whose cards you hold to narrow down the field of suspects only or accusing the avatars of your fellow players to reposition them and stop them from getting where they want to go.

Any experienced Risk player knows that while not precisely key to winning the game, taking and maintaining control of Australia is virtually always a highly beneficial move regardless of the rest of one's strategy. The continent's tiny size and few access routes means that it, on the one hand, very easy to initially capture, but also extremely easy to fortify into virtual invulnerability later on. The first player to get a meaningful foothold in Australia, therefore, can count on the continent's small (but far from meaningless) army bonus for the rest of the game, and there are few things others can do to change that.

For Agricola, it is key to know which action cards are likely to come out in the upcoming round (some action cards like the plow and sow field in a single action and grow family without available space give tremendous advantages) and therefore, savvy players will attempt to secure the "first player" position in the current round to nab them quickly, also seasoned players can guess the strategies of other players and will attempt to block them, and one way to really harm a player's strategy is to make the player right after him get the "first player" position, since he will then be pushed to the bottom of the turns, severely harming his chances of performing good actions in the next round.

Card Games

A combination of psychology and statistics go into the metagame behind Poker, especially in the popular variation of Texas Hold 'Em. The film Casino Royale (2006) shows a lot of the strategy of reading your opponents and playing statistics, and playing your opponent based on your knowledge that they too known the psychology and statistics. There are hundreds of books on the market available that are all about the metagame behind poker.

Interestingly, when fiction shows a bad poker player the common portrayal is someone who focuses too much on the Meta Game, ignoring the actual game.

The same goes, only far more so, for Bridge, one of the most complex of standard-deck strategy games.

Old-school poker was all about to the metagame. In some variations, such as Texas Hold 'Em, the cards can never be changed and the only influence the player has is in betting, which is dominated by the metagame. Some observers have noted that metagame-focused players are being confounded by modern players who ignore the metagame and place their emphasis on statistical analysis.

Statistical analysis, also known as "pot odds" in poker circles, has in fact become a significant part of the poker metagame, and doesn't really differ all that much from the traditional metagame (since authors such as Doyle Brunson effectively gave the same advice under the cloak of experience rather than providing numbers). An ever-increasing number of successful players are becoming aware of this, too, and will try to identify players who play by analysis only to scare them out of pots.

Metagame is why poker theorists will often divide the game of Texas Hold'em into "limit" and "no-limit", despite the only rule change being the size of bets. Since limit games have a fixed betting structure, the game is much more mechanical; players with a hand can't be scared out of pots by the threat of going all-in. The majority of hands in limit Hold'em go to a showdown, only a few hands do in no-limit. Very few players can succeed at both.

The entire point of Spades is the ability to accurately predict the number of books and bags each person at the table will take. You can win every single hand and still lose if your prediction was off. And winning any single trick is gonna be costly if you bid null — which happens because null, if made, is worth more than a positive number.

The Metagame is critically important in the card game Magic: The Gathering. Just walking in with a good deck won't do it; you need a deck that can handle the decks you expect other players to have. Dave Price famously won Pro Tour: Los Angeles based largely on a smart Metagame call — in a field where the overpowered Sligh deck ran rampant, Price included the obscure (and in most metagames, very bad) card Giant Strength in his Sligh deck, which gave him an advantage both in the mirror match and against life-gaining decks which were the bane of the traditional, untuned Sligh deck.

This column explains the basics of the M:TG metagame; the overall ideas apply for most metagames.

Despite being criticized as simplistic by more "experienced" CCG players, the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game has a metagame as well; taken too far, it leads to the "Toolbox" deck, a deck with no central theme but with every metagame-abusing card off the current Banned/Limited list. As with other card games, its metagame is susceptible to cookie-cutters and netdecking (a form of deck creation that pretty much mooches whatever the top decks in the last tournament were in an attempt to garner an easy win, the typical mindset that "if I use what the pros use, I'll play like the pros"). Also like the other games, it can be grossly mishandled by Executive Meddling or a lack of beta testing before releasing new cards (as with the notorious Invasion of Chaos Envoy monsters).

In fact, the Banned/Restricted list exists solely because of this. Changes to the list not only focus on banning overpowered cards, but also reflecting/changing the metagame. Key example is Jinzo, which used to be limited to 1 per deck due to it's decent power, ease of summoning, and effect that negates all traps. Eventually, stronger monsters and effects came out making Jinzo less and less powerful, which is reflected as Jinzo was eventually limited to 2, and is now currently unlimited (You can use 3).

Though some would argue that un-banning Jinzo was simply a cheap ploy to market a then-new group of cards which were based entirely around supporting/being created from Jinzo.

Upper deck entertainment has a reputation for this among players. They deliberately reorganize the metagame every so often, so that players invest heavily in the newest overpowered card (which usually requires buying about 3 boxes to find), before it gets replaced.

They also love to make a card readily available soon after banning it. The week Crush Card Virus was banned, Turbo Pack 2 came out, where it was a normal rare.

The card game 1000 Blank White Cards relies on metagames. Due to the nature of the game, the metagame changes indefinitely and there is a different metagame for every deck. The tendency to play with the same people and therefore familiar cards also produces the interesting effect that no strategy will (well, if your fellows are on the ball) be effective more than once, even if there are no cards in the current deck that shut down that strategy. Blanks are delicious.

The game of Fluxx is based on repeatedly changing the winning strategy; the best metagame strategy is to play your objective after you've finished setting it up.

Winning a game of Munchkin in any other than completely inexperienced company requires a lot of meta-gaming. The rules of the game themselves encourage backstabbing fellow players, making deals with them, deceiving them to swindle them out of valuable/dangerous cards, and cheating as much as you can without getting caught.

Counting cards at blackjack — that is, counting cards without getting caught — is two levels of metagame for the price of one. note Some people don't quite understand the concept of card counting. Essentially, it's a basic form of statistical analysis that allows the player to keep track of the number of high cards (10s and face cards) left in the deck or shoe and place bets accordingly. The casinos have long since gotten wise to the practice and will throw you out if they figure out you're doing it, primarily because it's a major hole in the casino business model. Effective card-counting teams can and occasionally will wipe out a casino for the night.

Even something as simple as Apples To Apples has a metagame. It's vital to know your opponents, what kind of sense of humor they have, and what kind of matches that they like in order to win.

Naturally, Cards Against Humanity takes it Up to Eleven. Does the judge for this round tend to pick the combination that's the funniest, the one that makes the most literal sense, or the one that's most offensive? Certain cards are commonly known as "trump" cards for being near-surefire winners in many situations: do you use your trump card now, or take a chance on a "lesser" card and save it for a better situation? And then there's the fact that most players don't go out of their way to maintain much of a poker face: if you see an opponent confidently slap down their card while barely holding back the giggles, you might be better off "burning" a less-useful card.

Tanto Cuore seems to be designed with a constantly-shifting metagame in mind. It's functionally a very simple game about managing card draw, resources, and deckbuilding strategies to gain victory points. But even the basic set has sixteen general maids, and you choose ten from that pool to play with. Potentially, you can play with seven different arms races involving various maids, even before adding in cards from the expansion.

This has spawned some meta-game fanfic based on card interactions. Play the game enough, and you'll understand why Colette and Kagari are best friends, or why Nena hates Claire, or why the Twilight sisters always seem to be terminally ill, or....

Similarly to the abovenote And by that, I mean that Tanto Cuore is incredibly derivative of Dominion, though it has its own traits, Dominion has many cards, including attacks, reactions, etc. What's more, there are several expansion packs, you can play with as many of them as you have, and each expansion has a different feel - and they synergize strangely. Sometimes a card might be the most useful thing in the game (and get picked up in seconds), or it might be effectively useless. (A card that blocks attacks isn't much help when there aren't any attacks to block, after all.)

Go Fish (or in the UK, with a special pack, Happy Families) has a metagame. The basic game is that you're supposed to be asking for the cards you want. The metagame comes in when you start working out what cards your opponents want, and trying to stall them by taking them yourself. This gets analysed by the character Solomon in the Terry Pratchett novel Dodger who concludes that Happy Families teaches kids the skills of deceit and bluff that could lead to them growing up to be professional gamblers or worse yet, politicians.

Live Action TV

In one episode of Have I Got News for You, Reginald D. Hunter was not only metagaming, but meta-metagaming, saying he should get points for fostering disharmony in the opposing team.

In the first episode of Sleuth 101 — an Australian comedy wherein a comedian enters a scripted whodunnit, and must improvise the role of detective and solve the mystery — guest detective Dave O'Neil utterly failed to piece together any of the clues presented in the story. Instead he broke completely out of character and began weighing the relative fame of the actors involved, finally choosing a culprit on the principal of Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize. He turned out to be correct.

Never actually shown in the series, but Captain Kirk of Star Trek beat the unwinnable Kobayashi Maru test by stepping outside of the scenario and adjusting the parameters (hacking) of the game. Many criticised him for cheating, but the Academy considered it "original thinking". He was then ordered never to tell anyone about it.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, an alien who is a master of a strategy game challenges Data to a game. Data makes every move with the best chance of winning, but still loses. In his second attempt, he makes every move with the goal of keeping the game at a stalemate. His opponent gets so frustrated by the endless game that he quits, effectively conceding defeat. Data considers the match a draw, but his friends assure him that he won.

Jeopardy! has recently experienced a shift in it's metagame, due to the work of Arthur Chu. Arthur has perfected a way of playing the game that involves hunting for the Daily Doubles by clearing out the bottom three rows (the ones which are usually the hardest and where the Daily Doubles usually are). When he does find them, he always attempts to answer them even if he doesn't know the answer to block other contestants from answering that Daily Double.

Reality TV

The Metagame on The Amazing Race has evolved over time. Traces of it developing can be seen in Seasons 1-7, though the full metagame does not come into effect until Season 10. It had two major effects on the game, first, shifting it from a game dominated by young, fit teams (especially "alpha male" teams) and those with extensive travel experience, to a game dominated by intelligent teams. Second, it gave teams who would have had no shot on early seasons (like Ronald & Christina, who were weak at physical tasks) a legitimate chance to win.

The courses themselves have evolved with the metagame, with the course designers lessening the occurrence of “place holder” tasks that no longer caused teams problems (like physical thrill tasks) and those that relied on luck (like the ever popular Needle in a Haystack tasks), and increased the number of tricks, and deceptive and vague clues that they threw at the racers. On Season 19, it became very apparent that the producers were well aware of the metagame, as they included several twists that were specifically designed to take advantage of the current metagame.

The Mole has a pretty strong metagame, to go along with the challenges the team competes in (and the Mole tries to sabotage). Naturally, part of the metagame is to sabotage a little yourself, to make everyone else suspicious of you. But also important is tracking everyone else's suspects so that if someone gets booted, you can figure that whoever he/she was suspecting is probably innocent. Finally, gathering as much information as you can on the other players - even the ones you don't originally think is the Mole - will help you in case you do need to move to a new suspect.

Survivor is all about this, as being able to continue playing and eventually win depends on how others vote, so a contestant's gameplay has to be tailored for the people he's playing with. Richard Hatch all but defined the metagame in the first season when he convinced his tribemates to coordinate their votes to target the opposing tribe; and alliances have been the top strategy ever since.

Another common strategy is to keep a weaker player around as your sidekick; he's easy to win against in the finals. Later seasons seem to take this to a larger scale, in that there seems to be an unspoken agreement not to vote out the Jerk Ass that nobody likes. True to metagaming principles, some players have made themselves look weak in order to get other players to simply not target them, and then try to pull a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass. (Brett, Fabio, Ashley) Others even knew they weren't going to be good at challenges or would just get overshadowed by awesome, so they tried to up their weakness so they would assume they're nothing.

Then there is the strategy of taking out weak players because other players are going to want to keep them over you later in the game. To make this happen, Cirie and Danielle pretended to be aligned with Courtney and Terry to vote out Aras, while Courtney and Cirie pretended to be aligned with Shane and Aras to vote out Danielle. In reality, Cirie was aligned with Danielle and Aras to vote out Courtney on a 3-2-1 vote. Basically, Cirie got Courtney to pretend to be in an alliance while the actual purpose of the fake alliance was to prevent the people who could save Courtney from working together.

The Hidden Immunity Idol is another element that has had enormous metagame implications, and has been prominently featured in two seasons:

Not only does it affect voting patterns (splitting votes to flush it out, voting for a less prominent member of the alliance to burn it off, etc.), but now the simple act of receiving a clue to the idol's whereabouts is something that players dissect and analyze for strategic gain.

In Samoa, Russell Hantz decided on this as his strategy (find all idols as soon as possible to save himself), to the point that he ends up finding one without a clue by searching visible landmarks in and around the tribe's camp. This would go on to be an integral part of later seasons, as players realized that they could do the same thing incredibly early (like Kristina discovering the idol in the first three days during Redemption Island). Russell himself also notes this in the first episode of Heroes Vs. Villains. Since the season was shot after filming for Samoa had finished, but before the live results were read, he had the advantage of coming into the game knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the other players, but they didn't know anything about him.

In Cagayan (which is often referred to as borderline-subversive for how much it plays with the established tropes present in the series), the contestants routinely talk about their awareness of both possible Idol and clue locations. During the first episode, when one person from each tribe is sent on ahead to their camp area, nearly everyone assumes that said players had a chance to look for the Idol. When Spencer finds an idol clue, Woo and Tony correctly deduce afterwards that he likely would have found a clue because they're hidden in napkins during relaxed moments when a team has won a reward challenge and is having lunch. Tony and Woo play on the rival tribe's awareness by using an idol clue for their own tribe to blindside the other by giving it to someone and marking him as a target. Woo later steals a clue from Spencer and causes chaos in the camp, leading everyone to get up and start searching for it.

First few weeks, nobody has any clear targets, but showing that you can win competitions or are obnoxious often gets you targeted. Hiding behind groups and not talking to anyone typically puts you at the bottom of the totem pole. Don't massively shift stuff or the whole house will come after you.

In later seasons, it's trying to become America's Favourite, especially if it's a showmance, because people who the viewers like seem to get lucky twists thrown their way.

Sports

A common instance of the meta game in sport is knowing the current standings in the competition. At best this influences how many risks are taken trying to win a game; at worst, as in the Badminton at the 2012 Olympics, players may deliberately lose matches to try to avoid strong opponents in later rounds.

For professional leagues, there are also amateur drafts, transactions and salary concerns. Even in leagues without a salary cap or any other sort of enforced parity, no one can afford to hire the best in everything.

Baseball

A critical element is Pitcher/Batter psychology, as well as the game of chicken base runners play with the pitcher and catcher.

There's also the fact that baseball leagues play many, many more games in a season than any other sport. No pitcher can play every game in a season, and very few position players can while staying productive. Most leagues have a "designated hitter" who does not field a position, and can be used to keep strong batters effective by keeping them out of the field; even then, teams almost always have to call up bench players and pinch hitters for later innings. Also, games are played in a series, rather than single match-ups. A team, may, for example, keep an ineffective starting pitcher in the game for many innings in the first game for a loss, and then clean up the next two with better starters and a fresh bullpen.

American football has this as well. The 2008 Miami Dolphins implemented an uncommon offensive formation: the "Wildcat" formation, in which the ball is directly snapped to the running back. This surprised most of their opponents, who had no idea how to defend against it, and as a result the Dolphins went from a league-worst 1-15 record to 11-5 and the AFC East title. Since then, however, opposing teams have devised effective countermeasures to the Wildcat offense - specifically by lining up the defensive tackles on the same side that the offense has put their extra blockers - and the Wildcat has since faded in popularity.

The difference in meta-game between College and NFL football is one of the reasons why certain star college players flounder once they go pro: they are overwhelmed by the difference in both skill and strategy and get injured or make bad decisions.

Same goes for coaches, too. After he retired from coaching for the University of Florida, Steve Spurrier tried to use his "Fun and Gun" offense (one that revolves around long passing plays) in the NFL and found out that most professional defensive linemen can out-think and out-run all but the best quarterbacks and wide receivers.

Signal stealing — reading opponent's hand signals and such from coaches to players on the field and using their plans against them. Signal stealing became particularly controversial in the National Football League in 2007, when the New England Patriots lost a draft pick for stealing signals by video tape in the 2006 season. (The Patriots' near-perfect 2007 season, stopped only in the Super Bowl, was seen by some as Bill Belichick's revenge for being ratted out.)

The LBW rule in cricket was introduced to stop a batsman defending his wicket with his leg, rather than his bat. Modern bowlers, particularly spin bowlers, often exploit the rule to get a batsman out LBW without him ever intending to get his leg in the way, and batting practice has responded similarly.

In fact, many deliveries are not even pitched to hit the stumps in the modern game- the batsman gets out when he plays the ball badly, and if he leaves the ball he'll be safe. Compare to baseball, where a pitcher can and does intentionally deliver some balls outside of the strike zone.

MMA, as begun in the UFC, first demonstrated the necessity of grappling, particularly Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Practitioners of any other style that had little to no understanding of submission holds inevitably lost to those who did. After a few events, fighters began to cross-train in grappling, particularly wrestlers, who combined their ability to get takedowns and secure top control with evading submissions and utilizing ground-and-pound to defeat pure grapplers. This led to the emergence of sprawl-and-brawl fighters who focused on takedown defense and striking to evade the groundgame of ground-and-pounders and box them up on the feet. While "wrestle-boxers" are still common, the most successful MMA fighters are those who are equally skilled in all facets of the game: striking, wrestling and grappling.

Fighters strengths tend to affect the style of a fight.

Often two dangerous grapplers tend to end up having mostly stand-up fight (since both are reluctant to go to the ground and hope to exploit perceived striking weaknesses).

Wrestlers can outstrike kickboxers by playing with the threat of a takedown. Strikers want to stay up at all cost, keeping their hands low to defend a shot, which can let a wrestler land easy strikes.

Some fighters are experts at playing the "metagame" of earning money through their fighting. Using a crowd-pleasing style, calling out the right fighters at the right time, talking trash online, building up your name recognition, and generally making yourself more marketable will have a great influence on who and how you fight as well as how much money you make over the course of your career.

The late kickboxing legend Andy Hug was famous for his axe kicks and using them for metagaming his opponents. Since axe kick comes down vertically from above, traditional boxing guard is useless against it. Opponents who tried to adjust their defense left massive openings elsewhere, which let Hug get a lot of knockouts with basic strikes.

Association Football's metagame has evolved massively, so much that even a cursory examination of the changes can result in long essays and even longer discussions.

The "formation" is the basic element of how a football team plays, with the numbering system based on how many defenders, midfielders/wingers (which are often combined should they rest on the same 'level', or split if they are 'defensive' or 'attacking' midfielders) or forwards a team has (the goalkeeper is often excluded). The only rule governing where players are allowed to be on the pitch is the offside rule, and that only applies to a team in possession of the ball. Other than that, any team can have any amount of players at any position on the field. But defensive and offensive formations have shifted as certain tactics became popular or unpopular.

The offside rule and the evolution of it, is a kickstarter for shifting the tactical metagame.

Early formations were about all out attack or all out defence, such as 1-1-8, 1-2-7 or 2-2-6, with little midfield play.

The first true 'formation' where a balance between attack and defence was achieved was the 2-3-5 in the 1880's, with 5 forwards, 3 'halfbacks' (which would be called midfielders in modern times) and two fullbacks (who would be central defenders). The 3 halfbacks would watch the middle three forwards of the opposition, and the two fullbacks would watch the two wide forwards. The central halfback was responsible for organising the defence and attack for his team.

The "WM" formation (described as a 3-2-2-3) of the 1920's was a reaction to a change in the offside rule, which meant it was less effective to have 5 forwards at the top of the attack.

The introduction of the 4-2-4 in the 1950's was the catalyst for the almost complete domination of football formations since by a defensive block comprising of the goalkeeper, two fullbacks and two central defenders.

The 4-4-2 formation was dominate during the 90's and early 2000's, with three flat lines comprised of four defenders, four midfielders (two of which being wingers who roam the flanks) and two strikers (often a big man and short man combination) this became the default for many teams and became synonymous with English football, becoming the title of a popular magazine, as well as being referenced in the film Mike Bassett: England Manager, who after trying & failing to come to grips with deliberately exaggerated modern formations, simply says that "England will be playing four four fucking two" and storms out of a press conference.

The death of the 4-4-2 as the standard football formation was complete by the early 2000's after inventive teams began to play formations with one striker removed in favour of another central midfielder. With supply choked by a defensive midfielder being protected by two other central defenders or a single attacking midfielder exploiting the space between the central defenders & central midfielders, teams were finding it very hard to retain the ball and thus found it hard to score.

These changes to formations have also evolved what players are required to do positionally.

The introduction of the backpass rule (penalising a team for a goalkeeper picking up the ball after being it is passed by one of their team-mates) in 1992 killed the then-current metagame tactic where a team in possession would work the ball back to their goalkeeper, who would pick it up then launch it right down the field towards the opposition goal. This happened after the staid 1990 World Cup. Prior to this, goalkeepers were required to do little more than save shots, pick up the ball & boot it all the way up to the other side of the field. This rule change was the start of goalkeepers actually using their feet to pass to their defenders instead of just firing it up field.

The sweeper was a central defensive role (often with two other central defenders in front of him) meant to cover situations where the opposition would fire the ball over the head of the defense to chase. Changes to the offside rule and the introduction of single forward formations rendered this position effectively obsolete. It was eventually replaced by the idea of a "sweeper keeper". With teams using the offside trap to push opposition forwards well up the pitch, the goalkeeper can be required to use their speed to run well outside of his penalty area to "sweep" balls over the top like the old central defensive sweeper did, while also being a traditional shot saving goalkeeper.

The central defender role evolved from chasing opposition wingers, to man-marking one of a pair of attacking forwards, to zonally marking a space to cover the movements of a single lone striker as well as midfielders entering the penalty box, as well as adding the "ball playing" role in teams who want to keep possession and build their attacks instead of just launching the ball forward.

The popularity of formations with a fullback and a winger on the edge of the playing space have destroyed formations that only have one wide player on each side, the flamboyant "wingback" of South America is dead in modern football, as allowing a team to overload one defender with two wide attackers is suicidal.

Attacking fullbacks working with their winger is a relatively new invention. Improved athleticism meant that fullbacks can run the length of the field to attack the opposition, then "track back" to do their defensive duty. Where previously fullbacks did little more than track the opposition wingers and stuck to their own half of the field to defend, it was realised that should they push up in attack, their opponent in attack would be the often defensively deficient opposition winger. The introduction of 'overlapping', where the fullback would run past their winger to provide options for a cross was also another revelation.

The defensive or holding midfielder evolved with the change from the 4-4-2 to 4-2-3-1 or other three man central midfield formations, as a player intended not simply to destroy the opposition and win the ball back, but to hold the ball and help to keep possession and build his teams attack from deep within his own half. On the other side of the pitch, a team may have two central midfielders that feed an attacking midfielder such as a "trequartista" or "false 9" who has the job of directing the attack of his team and carving out opportunities for his striker and wingers.

Teams playing a single forward require a striker who can do everything. The 'lone striker' or 'target man' is required to hold the ball for his team to arrive from defence to support, to play in other attackers, while also getting into positions to shoot at goal.

Penalty shootouts are their own little metagame. Modern teams and supporters now track what players do when taking or saving penalties.

In addition to formations and players, a team may have a 'philosophy' in terms of how they choose to attack. Example of this in the modern sport are a team deciding to play defensive and then counter-attack with fast players, or to hold the ball at all costs in order to give them the best chance of creating a shooting chance.

Where to position players for corner kicks. For a century teams put a defender on each goal post and then man-marked everyone inside the box. Some teams take a modern approach and use defenders to zonally mark like in basketball. Other teams use a combination of man-marking and zonal marking. There is also the question of having a defender on each post, or only one post, or both posts but with one defender moving to 'close down' a player who moves to the corner to take receipt of a 'short corner'.

The "Golden Goal" rule was intended to shake the metagame of extra time by giving teams a better incentive to score a goal (with instant victory should a team score a goal in extra-time), ostensibly to avoid penalty shootouts. It had the opposite effect, because teams knew that allowing the other team to score would mean certain defeat. So they played even more defensive that before. It was removed very soon after it was introduced.

Tabletop Games

In general, "metagaming" in Tabletop RPGs is when a player uses knowledge that he possesses that is not possessed by his character in order to get an advantage within the game. It's generally frowned upon as bad role-playing, though games placing low emphasis on role-playing might accept or encourage it. Types of metagaming include:

Using personal expertise or knowledge of the real world that your character would have no way to know, such as a chemist deciding that his dim-witted barbarian is going to suddenly invent gunpowder.

Using knowledge of the rules or playbooks that are outside of the character's experience. For example, an novice adventurer immediately using fire during his first troll attack because the player has read the Monster Manual, not because the character knows their weaknesses. Properly, the player must make some sort of knowledge-based role for information that he hasn't experienced and isn't common knowledge.

Acting based on knowing the GM's habits, such as treating a nobleman like a villain because the nobleman always does a Face-Heel Turn at some point. Of course, this can be just as much the fault of the GM, who could also use this against players to surprise them.

A good kind of metagaming is simply knowing what kind of game the players want to have and acting accordingly. Is the GM is a Killer DM, a serious roleplayer, or a relaxed Monty Haul enthusiast? Do the players want to be part of an epic saga of Good vs. Evil, or do they simply want to have fun by killing monsters and taking their stuff? Knowing the style of play ahead of time will guide your actions in-game and make the game more enjoyable for everyone.

Paranoia games are generally not taken seriously, and consequently, it has a lot of fun with metagaming.

The rulebook tells the GM openly to deny players access to the rulebook so that they cannot metagame. At the same time, it tells players to read the entire rulebook and lie about it.

Players who have any experience with the game will know that everyone in their party is a mutant traitor who will be trying to kill them, that R&D equipment is dangerous, the Computer is insane, and everything is working against them. They will of course play with this knowledge in mind from the get-go, and this is generally expected.

The Warhammer 40,000 metagame varies depending on which edition is being played and which books have been published within that edition.

One constant of the 40k meta-game generally revolves around what the most powerful codex is against the Space Marines. Space Marine armies comprise of the majority of tournament armies because they are the most common army type and are never too far away from the top tier armies, the basic meta-game revolves around either making the strongest possible Space Marine army, making the strongest possible anti-Space Marine army, or Taking The Third Option and building the strongest army against whatever is the major anti-Space Marine army, and hoping you get more of the anti-Space Marine armies, giving you the advantage because you are built to fight them, and they are built to fight Space Marines. Tournaments have been won by the taking of the third option simply by luck of the draw.

5th Edition:

In general, 5th Edition is dominated by fully mechanised lists using small units in transports for two major reasons, vehicles were very durable, and infantry units could hold objects while being inside the vehicles.

Prior to Matt Ward's controversial rewrite of Grey Knights had a meta-game of Dark Eldar beat Space Wolves, Space Wolves beat Imperial Guard, Imperial Guard beat Dark Eldar. These 3 armies were the top tier in terms of effectiveness. Space Marines easily countered by any of the above three. After the Grey Knights re-write this rock-paper-scissors scenario has remained but with the GK looming over the triad as it has access to almost all of the Space Wolves tricks and some of the IG's elements along with their own. Necrons got in on the act towards the end of 5th edition as well.

6th Edition:

Infantry could no longer hold objective inside transports. Vehicles were more vulnerable. This caused a shift towards combined arms and infantry lists.

In early 6th Edition flyers were dominating, if only because almost no one had access to anti-air, with Necrons and IG taking advantage because they could field huge amounts of flyers compared to most armies. The introduction of a new Tau codex saw them given easy access to anti-air weapons, serving as a hard counter to all-flyer lists and causing their popularity to drop.

When the Chaos Space Marine codex was released at the beginning of 6th edition, the Heldrake jumped back and forth in the meta, with many considering it a poor flyer. The basic weapon it used, the Baleflamer, was considered to be a powerful-looking weapon in theory but not in practice. While the flamer could wipe out whole squads of Space Marines, it was not effective against either the vehicles the Marines were likely to sit inside, or other fliers. That is, until it was discovered how amazing the Vector Strike rule was, allowing Heldrakes to one-two punch by cracking open vehicles and THEN using the Baleflamer. As the metagame rolled on the Heldrake is considered one of the most powerful units in the game, combining the advantages of being a flyer with durability and ability to destroy nearly any infantry unit without a 2+ save, and is probably single-handedly keeping the mediocre Chaos army competitive.

6th Edition weakened assault armies by making charge distance random and thus less reliable (not to mention making charging through cover almost impossible), while giving the charged unit the ability to fire overwatch shots at the attacker. The assault metagame would have survived this (dedicated assault units usually have "Fleet", which actually helped them charge further than 5th edition) if it weren't for the gutting of the ENTIRE Games Workshop catalog to nerf every unit with the ability to assault "out of reserve". This had made the metagame shooting-focused, with armies dedicated to shooting being more effective than they had in previous editions.

Virtually any wargame - particularly miniatures game - where a) each players' force is chosen using "points" and b)the effectiveness of various weapons varies based on the targets' characteristics (and c) where the effectiveness of troops varies by terrain and the map layout is not known until after the forces are selected) the troop selection itself can be more important than the strategy and tactics used in the game itself.

To give an example, one common Terran strategy vs Protoss was to put down two factories and produce lots of units to make an attack. Then the Terran metagame evolved to incorporate acting like you're putting down two factories and making a little attack to put the opponent on the defensive but you're actually only making one factory and saving for an expansion to gain an economic advantage - the fake double. This became so popular that it is normal and Protoss players anticipate it, so now Terrans can now also try to give the appearance that they are doing the fake double but meanwhile they actually really are putting down two factories to make a serious attack. Which is known as the fake fake double. Mindbending.

Not the end of the story. If they're going for a fake double, they often show that they are mining their Vespene Gas at maximum effeciency in exchange for mineral mining. This is a sign that they are going for a double. In fact, many players mine gas at maximum effeciency until their opponent's scout is gone, then stop, to make the opponent think they are going double. Most Protoss players have figured this out though, and now usually know it's an early expansion. In fact, the Terrans adapted to the Protoss, and actually DO go for the double. Yes, the Protoss adapted again, and play safer, but then the Terrans just go for the expansion. Continuous Metagame development.

This becomes much more prevalent in Starcraft II where Scouts are crucial in knowing what you are dealing with. For Zerg it is fairly straightforward, early expansion or just go for the safer spawning pool? Do you produce a slew of zerglings to prep yourself for tier 2 or go for roaches to buff up your defenses? Did your oppoenent research burrow? Or did he go for the ventral sacs? the questions are never answered unless you know what your opponent is doing. Because of how fast the games get (due to the bases getting mined out earlier) it makes it all the more important to scout because everything moves quickly.

Ironically it also makes the Terran much more difficult to predict because of the ease to build and swap attachments. Since buildings can swap, it means that when you thought he was going for Marauders when he built that Barracks for the tech lab, he can just fake you out and swap it for a factory to build siege tanks and thors.

In Company of Heroes, the online meta-game is constantly shifting. Certain moves are considered "correct", with little variation. When you encounter high level players, building an Observation Post early in the game will elicit cries of "NOOOOOB!!!!". One tactic developed for the American faction involves pumping out 4 of the pathetically weak "engineer" units and building an early game OP or two. It is shockingly effective, and it is completely hilarious to have the guy who just spent 2 minutes shouting about how noobish you are get brought to his knees by a combined arms symphony he has never seen before.

This is a common theme among every single online game with a strong metagame: Most players who know about the latest metagame will assume you are a complete idiot if you're not following it, even if what you're doing is so effective that everyone else will jump on board by next week.

Dawn of War 2's multiplayer is a game that has a decent amount of shifting with subsequent patches and lots of the game's inner workings not being stated inside it, requiring players to go to forums and ask more experienced players to better understand how to play the multiplayer.

Extensive knowledge of the metagame is essential in World of Warcraft and many other MMOs. Particularly in "raids" where large groups of players must work together to defeat a boss or complete a task, the group leader must know exactly how many players of each class to have, what equipment they should be wearing, and where and what they should be doing at each stage of the battle. This is less necessary in games where the classes are more flexible, such as City of Heroes.

This has become less true for World of WarcraftPvE, as in Wrath of the Lich King, classes' abilities have a good deal more overlap, but in PvP, the metagame still changes with every patch.

And then there's the forum metagaming, where classes and specs underplay their effectiveness to ridiculous levels in order to obtain buffs in the next patch. Whether or not this is actually effective is a topic for much debate.

In Season 1, players picked whatever (or perhaps the overpowered champions) and went wherever.

In Season 2, players settled on five fixed roles: an ADC (ranged attack damage carry) farming bottom lane protected by a support who doesn't farm, an APC (mage) goes mid, a bruiser (bulky fighter) goes top, and there is a jungler who is usually a tough controller or fighter. There are good reasons for this, but they don't matter much in low-mid level gameplay and most players don't even know them. It's just something people do because the pros do it.

In Season 3, the community settled on a list of acceptable champions for each role, and picking any other champion/role combination will result in a barrage of insults followed by several reports.

Much of this has to do with the fact that the developers, despite claiming the contrary, do in fact balance the game for this metagame to a fairly obvious degree, setting each role in stone by providing them with the items they need to function well in their role.

The current five roles replaced the old strategy of putting the AD carry in the mid lane (considered the safest solo lane) and just putting whoever in bottom lane once the playerbase realised that a support COULD be played with no gold, allowing the carry to farm a solo lane while being more protected than if they'd actually been solo. Sometimes teams will "lane swap" and put their ADC and support lane in top and their solo laner in bottom to try and pressure the enemy solo laner down for an early turret, but they always eventually come back to bottom lane for Dragon control. Not even the most radical and experimental pro teams have been able to successfully break this meta yet.

Only if you actually want to play a meta-game. What becomes more and more obvious for old-timers is that not playing a metagame is the best way to win and utterly crush your enemy. The reason is plain simple - metaplayers will expect anyone else use one of few meta tactics. If you won't use any of them, then their own strategy is in ruins, because they are expecting everyone mindlessly following meta, not an original tactics or crazy, but well-executed stunts. Leads directly to the point when you crush your enemy with little trouble and he call you a noob for not playing meta.

This doesn't work against decent players though. They can always fall back on simply turtling until your bruiser based kill lane loses its advantage, then win the late game.

SivHD is a player well-known for playing the game in entirely INSANE way from the point of view of metagaming... yet he beats crap out of anyone, anytime.

One popular tactic for breaking meta game is/was to run the entire team with teleport summoner spells and all push mid lane at once to quickly overwhelm the enemy mid laner (which is where previously Joke Characters like Heimerdinger who excelled at pushing became very useful). Typically, even if they lost a tower at mid and or top, they could get the enemy's second mid tower by then which provides huge early map control while putting the other team dangerously off balance (and if they could manage to get the enemy's inhibitor it would force their entire team to defend mid to avoid losing).

A more subtle case is the fact that call order (whoever says "mid" first gets mid) is a thing in unranked games with no specific pick order. This does frequently lead to flame wars, but may god have mercy on you if you disregard this "rule" and just pick a role without calling it first.

Players frequently try to report people they perceive as not following the currently accepted metagame, under the delusion that it qualifies as some sort of bannable TOS violation, like using a hacked client. note This is less crazy as it sounds, as a single player failing to cooperate with his team can cost a game, but it's too nebulous to properly define what would qualify. The closest thing to a general definition that exists is "if it makes sense and is just an unconventional choice that you know what you're doing with, go for it; if it's stupid and nonsensical and seems to be less an attempt to think outside the box and more an attempt to break meta just because you can, don't do it unless you want the Tribunal on your ass" Riot Games' complaints forum has a standing warning not to report this.

In the original Guild Wars campaign, the player had to fight his own twin in a 'mirror match'. What made this battle especially difficult was that the 'mirror' was a true 'mirror', including possessing whatever skills the player had equipped at time. One novel Meta Game strategy was to load the character down with health-sacrifcing and 'damage reflection'-type skills, and make a 'suicide run' on the mirror boss. Since the mirror-double could only use the player's currently-equipped skills, it would literally 'attack itself to death' within seconds of the battle commencing.

Or, if you were a ranger, make a beastmaster build completely loaded with pet skills - none of which your doppelganger can use because it doesn't get a pet.

PvP in Guild Wars is heavily metagamed, since each player can only bring eight skills into the match, and players are almost always on the same level in terms of overall power. Over the years, this has seen the rise and fall of many solo and team-based strategies, as new ideas blaze ahead, then die off as everybody else tries to counter it.

From the PVP to the economy, EVE has a metagame that would make a hardcore Starcraft gamer weep. Considering that what's on the line is often worth thousands of real-world dollars, and epicheists and scams are not only allowed, but one of the main selling points, this is to be expected. How serious is it? The developers have hired a real-world economist to study the in-game economy, and there is at least one recorded instance of players causing a blackout in order to knock a rival player offline at a critical moment. While Blizzard and the various tournament sponsors attempt to keep the Starcraft metagame confined to game mechanics, CCP practically encourages social engineering between players.

Backstabbing a friend in Eve can and has ended years long friendships... of course, some people have made said friends just so they can backstab them in Eve months or years later. Eve has kind of a scary metagame at times.

A particularly good writeup about EVE's metagaming in practice detailing how HYDRA/Outbreak won the 2011 Alliance Tournament, including spying on the other odds-on favourites (especially the winner of the last three tournaments, Pandemic Legion) and successfully feeding intelligence to other teams in order to knock out Pandemic Legion's second team in the pre-qualifying round.

Even more amusingly, the entire complex metagame has basically been thrown out the door and replaced by a new one, as the coming new expansion pack caused players to fight over certain resources. This triggered *total war*, with the entire game transforming into a binary conflict between two factions, all others either allied or destroyed. More news as it arrives.

The war for Tribute was won (on the military side) by Goonswarm's superior ability to leverage the time zones in which battles took place. Fighting on European time, Goonswarm and their allies (the Clusterfuck Coalition) were pre-eminent, and they later regained that advantage in US time (after they got their asses kicked to hell and back a few times), but NCDot fleets were unassailable in Australia's peak hours...so Goonswarm avoided fighting on AU time and fought on EU and US time. Incidentally, the whole war is rumored to have startedbecause the CEO of NCDot US was sleeping with an enemy of the CFC, and ended in part because the EU CEO hadn't been particularly interested in joining a messy and unprofitable war with the CFC in the first place, leading to the collapse of the alliance.

One of the issues that "higher-level" Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars players in clans have with "pub" players, those that wander into spontaneous Battle.Net sessions, is that, while each player may have a certain theoretical knowledge of the strategies meant for each Hero, in practice these players rarely will coordinate to choose a lineup of Heroes that synergise well, lowering the effectiveness of the team. In addition, a certain amount of psychology and "mindgaming" is a tool that enables some players to outfight their enemies even when the odds are against them.

Urban Dead has a very extensive metagame, with the game's Wiki serving as its central hub. User-created barricade plans determine which buildings can be used as entry points and where dead survivors can be revived (among other things). Add in coordinated activities (such as raids) and intergroup diplomacy, and you have a level of depth that can keep you occupied for much longer than playing the actual game.

Its cousin Nexus War is this cranked Up to Eleven. Raids on enemy factions are approximately 95% coordinating with your factionmates on IRC and 5% raiding.

And there was politics. Honest to god politics. The meta game was very very complicated, which was a big part of its decline and eventual demise until it was revived as Nexus Clash, which has been re-growing the same level of meta game complexity ever since.

There's an amusing lampshade hung on this one by the indie game World of Goo. The signs that pop up in every level with cryptic sayings also pop up in the free-play Corporation mode, where the player uses all of their collected goo-balls to build a massive tower. The game looks online and picks out other player's Corporation towers and floats the statistics of said tower on your screen as a small cloud. The sign's rather amusing message contains the phrase, "Everyone's building up. What's up there anyway? Some kind of metagame?"

Street Fighter II and almost all 2D fighting games have only two things going in the screen at higher levels: Meta Game and Combos. Combos are a "safe" way to inflict decent damage, but decent players don't let themselves open for them, so most matches consist on both players trying to find an opening and dealing damage while not giving themselves away and losing, and this is where most of the metagame is found. For example, in mid-to-high-level matches, when the two characters are looking for openings at a very close range it's called "footsies", and it's not weird to see someone lose because he threw a crouching medium kick at the wrong range and got punished in the few frames of recovery it has by a well timed crouching roundhouse. There are glossaries full of words used every day in the fighting game community when discussing the metagame, and they all describe essential concepts. Most of the times, the basic strategy in 2D and 3D fighting games involves putting your opponent in a state of disadvantage (knockdown, frame disadvantage, plain fear of your pokes, etc) and use a "mixup", which your opponent will have to block/avoid correctly to avoid the damage and/or disadvantage it could inflict, but for example projectile characters can also take another approach and play a "keep-away" game, "chipping" their opponents to death while punishing their attempts to attack. There are thousands of different strategies (sometimes even more than one for each match-up), and thousands of counter-strategies, and all of them use metagame concepts like "zoning", "mindgames" and "pressure" to their fullest.

Super Smash Bros. has developed a fairly extensive metagame, with standard techniques known for the most-played characters. Former champion Ken is generally considered to have invented the majority of the Marth metagame. As a result, every knowledgeable Marth player these days is in some way inspired by Ken.

The Metagame for Melee has risen to a ridiculous level that is still evolving nine years after the game came out. Every character has unique special moves with unique cancels which add a high element of unpredictability. For example, a Falco may approach an opponent using short-hopped lasers to quickly deliver stun and set up for an attack. However, many professionals are capable of frame-perfect shielding, which has led to use of the running powershield technique, which reflects the stun laser back at Falco and perfectly sets up an attack if performed correctly. A good Falco will play differently when confronted with a player capable of the running powershield.

Jigglypuff was medium-low tier in 2002. Now, it's top tier.

Meta Knight in Brawl is considered so broken that choosing not to play as him is pretty much choosing not to win.

Which is why he was banned from competitive play

Actually, MK vs. Pikachu officially is considered even, and several of the other high tiers are considered only slightly disadvantaged. (See this.) Videlicet, other characters can (and do) win. And even then, the Unity Ruleset Committeenote a Smashboards/AllIsBrawl project to create a unified ruleset for all "official" Brawl tournaments has been disbanded, so banning MK is left completely to individual tournament organizers, who now commonly run simultaneous MK-legal and MK-banned events.

And now there's Divekick, which boils the complicated finger-fumbling down to only two moves: Dive and Kick, for a game that's very light on mechanics and very heavy on metagame.

Pokémon, being a multiplayer battling game, has also developed an extensive metagame, becoming more popular as connectivity expanded. Tournaments are heavily influenced by the metagame, to the point where certain creatures with great stats or moves are considered nigh-unplayable because of the environment of the time.

People started to find out and manipulate the game's hidden numbers for a Pokemon's stats, such as Natures and Individual Values permanently input to a Pokemon, and Effort Values, which depend on which enemy Pokemon you train your Pokemon with.

And as an in-game example, The Rival always chooses his starting Pokémon after you do, and systematically chooses the one whose type is strong against yours.

The card game even more so. Pokemon have weakness and resistance in this game as well, so even if you have a powerful deck, you can still be blown out by a deck whose Pokemon had a type advantage against you. There was at least one period where more than half of tournament decks were the same thing, making it a viable strategy to build a deck entirely to beat that (and for the most part, lose to anything else).

The Platinum sets had "the SP deck", filled with Supporter and Trainer cards that required the usage of SP Pokemon in your deck. They were always better than non-SP versions of the same card (example: Bebe's Search and SP Radar, Poketurn and SP Turn). It's supreme card quality made many SP decks incredibly powerful and popular, but it had one weakness: all of the SP Pokemon were Basic Pokemon. Thus, it's counter was born, the Machamp Take-Out deck. And since Machamp's weakness is Psychic type Pokemon, there was Gardellade that was good against it. And so on.

There is actually an incredibly advanced online Pokemon Metagame where people use an online simulator instead of using the actual game for a more regulated environment. Usage statistics are tracked for everything, and analyzed often. There is also an established Character Tiers system with about five different developed metagames.

The metagame of Pokemon is also the source of many cases of Kick the Dog, where certain Pokemon are put down for stats, abilities, or other properties that make them "useless", and can be upsetting to those who don't care about stats and believe that any Pokemon, given the right level, moves, and training can be useful. Accepting that one's favorite Pokemon cannot be used practically in the Standard metagame is a tough pill that almost every newcomer has to swallow.

Note that Smogon doesn't discourage people using their favorite Pokemon (provided that the tier of said Pokemon doesn't compete below its placing, i.e. Arceus shouldn't be used in anything below Uber competition). In fact, the tier system pretty much allows virtually all Pokemon to be played in a form of tournament - even though most low-tier ones don't get any support or analyses for usage in tiers they're deemed too weak/outclassed for.

Game Freak seems to have shown an ambiguous level of awareness and support for the metagame over the years. On one hand, they introduced the Battle Frontier and the extremely useful EV-adjusting berries in Emerald, but then they introduced Team Preview for Wi-Fi battles in Black and White, which revealed each player's team to their opponent and vice versa, thus destroying many strategies that depended on the element of surprise.

The free browser-based strategy game Cybernations' gameplay consists of pressing a few buttons everyday. Most of the actual "gameplay" comes from people making alliances and engaging in diplomacy.

The Gamerscore on XBox 360 could count as a metagame, especially considering all the satellite websites and communities that have sprung up around it.

If you play World in Conflict long enough, you learn to anticipate just where and when exactly the next tank buster strike will come, considering that your tanks stood in a certain position in plain view for a few seconds. Of course, a player who knows that will place another tank buster to where you will have moved your units just in time for it to hit you. Nicer players will also warn their support about incoming strikes. You will also learn the good spots to hide your snipers that will never be found by anyone who doesn't know where to find snipers that can't be found. And where to drop your nukes on do_Spaceneedle to kill dozens of enemies and neutralize two enemy positions at once. And you'll know what the cluster bombs/airdrop combo is and exactly why you shouldn't use it unless in dire situation.

Ragnarok Online has a great many builds and metagame strategies, not just for PvP, but for the War of Emperium. Skilled players can interpret opponent's strategies, builds, and items, with only a minimum of contact on the battlefield. This also changes, sometimes drastically, on different custom servers.

The meta game for Guitar Hero and Rock Band mostly consists of the physical aspects of actually playing an instrument. This includes fingering and tapping (using both hands on fret buttons) for guitar and bass parts, and sticking for drums. Using Star Power/Overdrive appropriately is also a big factor in maximizing scores, and a lot of research goes into determining the best path for deploying it.

The research that goes into it has led to people making programs that, given the chart data in the game, can determine the best "path" for using Star Power/Overdrive. One person, in attempt to determine the best path for a full band performance of a song, made a program that could essentially brute-force its way through a full band path, which requires such a large amount of computational power and time that it costs about $2 to path each song.

Not to mention squeezing, which is essentially playing slightly ahead or behind rhythm for one note or more to maximize the notes you get under Star Power/Overdrive. Playing off-rhythm. In a rhythm game. Somehow, it all works. To screw with your mind even more, on some drum songs you can get better scores by overhitting.

Spies (a class that can nearly perfectly mimic an enemy class) seemed way too powerful, to the point where teams basically relied on Spies to do anything useful. This lasted until people realized that Pyros could just use their flamethrowers on any person on their team; the ones who catch fire are Spies. Plus, the Spy will have just caught fire, which will hasten their demise. This practice, now known as Spychecking, is now widely used by most Pyro players, bringing the game back into relative class balance.

The reason this happened was because Valve removed friendly fire on as a server option. Until that point, the majority of servers included friendly fire, meaning the Pyro couldn't spycheck without blasting his friends with flame, making it much less useful. With no friendly fire, the Pyro could spycheck at will with no penalty beyond losing a few units of ammo.

The Spy also relies on the metagame to perform effectively. He has to know how certain classes behave, recognize certain tactics, know various routes and blind spots on a map and generally play with the opponent's mind, much like a true spy.

This trope is also a major factor in the Unpleasable Fanbase. Every time an update ships, somebody's bound to complain that the new items upset the existing meta-game, claiming that it gives one or more classes an unfair advantage/disadvantage. Sometimes they're right. (This very wiki had to devote an entire subpage to the new and interesting ways you can now make certain classes nigh unbeatable in skilled hands.)

It should also be noted that TF 2 has a completely different competitive scene than the developers intended. While normal play involves 24 players with few if any class limits, two completely different competitive scenes have evolved, one involving 12 players with some class limits, and another involving 18 players with strict class limits. Additionally, "6v6" has a considerable amount of items which are banned from competitive play. "9v9" (Known as Highlander because each team has only one of each class), while having significantly fewer items banned from competitive play, does also institute item bans.

To elaborate, the 6v6 mode is typically on of the more "even" Capture Points maps (Grainary is the most common). Even though there are usually no restriction on what classes can be taken, 9/10 times it will be the optimal lineup (2 Scouts, 1 Demoman, 1 Medic, 1 "Roamer" that's usually a Soldier and 1 "Pocket" who stick with the Medic and is also usually a Soldier). Also, even though most "OP" weapons are banned, you will rarely if ever see anything besides the default loadouts, since these have no drawbacks compared to the sidegrades. While Vanilla TF 2 may be anywhere on the silliness scale, competitive TF 2 is usually considered Serious Business.

The Mann VS Machine mode also (predictably) has a metagame - not as evolved as the PvP one, but still. However, due to the Two Cities update which added a few new missions and buffed the Medic significantly, it underwent major changes (from the old Scout-Engie-Heavy-Heavy-Demo-Pyro setup, to the new Scout-Engie-Heavy-Medic-Demo-Soldier setup). A lot of things that sacrifice splash damage and crowd control abilities for single-target damage are also viewed as inferior to other options (which is partially true, due to the nature of the gamemode). Players also tend to be suspicious of Spies and Snipers, as they require more skill than other classes and correct upgrade paths to be effective (but when it does happen...).

The online card game War Metal Tyrant has a fairly complex, and well-defined metagame, though similar to Yu-Gi-Oh, players consider the metagame to be moving towards a cookie-cutter layout where the aim is to pack as many of the strongest cards available into a deck. The usual decks used to be Tiatlapreds, Wall-stalls, Reaperspam, II rush, Pummeller/Bloodpool, and Xeno slowroll, all of which interacted with each other in complex ways, however most of these decks are considered moot and have been outstripped by cards with Summon and Refresh, two very unbalancing skills. At the time of writing, Righteous Slowroll is most dominant, with Raider Rally and Xeno Summon being very prominent.

MechWarrior Living Legends has a particularly complicated metagame in its competitive circles. Knowing the enemy team is absolutely critical to winning a match - what BattleMechs or other vehicles they take, their preferred tactics (Smoke Jaguars loved to Zerg Rush, Knights of the Inner Sphere prefer to dominate the skies, Russian Death Legion loves to snipe, etc), and knowing the huge maps are all required for a victory. Tactics that don't normally work in pub games are often very powerful in competitive matches - such as hidden battlearmor using the Target Acquisition Gear to guide in friendly artillery missiles, or one team holding forces in reserve until the enemy team reveals itself.

Star Trek Online has a specific metagame for its endgame PVE missions, especially its Special Task Force missions. However, when Power Creep struck the game, the metagame essentially went to crap until Delta Rising released, forcing the metagame back, but leaving players utterly confused and rage-worthy because of it.

Given its Perpetual Beta status, Little War Game has had an evolving metagame since its creation in September of 2013. Catapults, Mages, Wolves, Dragons, Watchtowers, and even Workers have been overpowered at one point or another.

Splatoon had an evolving metagame before it technically even came out: During the first hour-long prerelease Testfire demo, a lot of players gravitated toward the Splat Roller, which could cover enormous amounts of ground with ink as well as Splat anyone it came into contact with, prompting numerous players to declare the roller overpowered. Then the next round of testfires happened, and said complaints began to vanish as players familiarized themselves with the game and began to figure out countermeasures. Then the game was actually released, and the metagame has been almost constantly evolving ever since. The enormous variety in available weapons, combined with the fact that weapon effectiveness varies depending on what mode and map is being played, means that players are constantly re-evaluating every weapon. The period after the game's release made it even more fluid, as a new weapon and/or map was released every week, causing players to adjust.

The Order of the Stick is an RPG Mechanics Verse rather than an actual game, but the characters are well aware of this fact. We have seen characters blatantly take advantage of things like there only being one Random Encounter per trip regardless of length (more would take up too much time), become the rivals of other characters so they can level up without doing any work (you will be the same level as your rival, so a fight between you is suitably dramatic), and acknowledge that being a human is best because somehow you will learn just as much magic in decades as an elf will in centuries (and if you start as another class and then multiclass into a wizard, you skip years of training because it is retroactively assumed you have been practicing all along).

Applejack's player in Friendship is Dragons has incorperated Justified metagaming into her build. Specifically, AJ is a Ranger whose familiarity with the habits of everyone who lives in Ponyville allows her to say that she knows them well enough to predict how they'll react in various situations.

Twilight accidentally metagamed when first meeting Rarity. Rarity tried to present herself as an ordinary dressmaker, but Twi's player had seen her character sheet and knew she was a Rogue, causing her to act extremely suspicious and basically badger her into confessing. The repercussions of this have colored their relationship both IC and OOC ever since.

Web Original

NationStates is an elaborate, multifaceted metagame that may or may not require you to have anything to do with the actual game it's attached to.

Real Life

Savvy military commanders sometimes metagame during wargames and similar exercises. They usually get a lot of flak from their superiors afterwards due to the prevailing belief that real engagements wouldn't have fixed enough rules to be exploited, and that it may invalidate data they are trying to gather. However, public opinion will not be kind to simulations that outlaw meta-gamey tactics for what seem spurious reason: Millenium Challenge 2002 is the best known of these, wherein opposing general Paul Van Riper of the "Red Team" used motorcycle messengers to deliver orders to troops and World War II era light signals to launch planes without radio communication, knowing that the United States' "Blue Team" would be using sophisticated electronic surveillance, then launching a massive attack as soon as Blue demanded a surrender, crippling Blue's forces. At this point, the games were stopped, and were restarted along more scripted lines. Realizing that his team was being instructed not to follow his orders, Van Riper resigned from the game, and publicly characterized the game as a set-up to validate strategies that had not actually faced testing.

To be fair he also cheated heavily and his tactics wouldn't have worked in real life either. When he attacked the Blue Team's fleet he did so by claiming that a fleet of fishing trawlers fired anti-ship missiles even though they couldn't possibly hold them. In addition he used suicide vessels and tried to ignore the countermeasures that would be used against them in reality, primarily naval helicopters. Also, his motorcycles somehow could travel at the speed of light.

Arguably, the Office of Naval Research could be said to be taking advantage of this with their online game platform MMOWGLI (Massive Multiplayer Online War Game Leveraging the Internet) to combat Somali pirates. It puts teams of players in the roles of the Navy and pirates in which they will have the expected resources of each side and have to pursue their respective goals against each other. A control team ensures no one does anything phenomenally stupid or unrealistic.

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